Bottlenecks in Acute Stroke Care and Research

Everyone should write to Stroke magazine, part of the ASA, with your ideas. I'm sure none will get published because they would gore everyone associated with the stroke medical world. Damn if they want to run with the bulls let them get gored. I'm going to put something together, haven't decided yet if I'm going to use the snarky attitude or the conciliatory one. I think I will try both.
http://stroke.ahajournals.org/content/45/1/6.extract?etoc

Solutions and Innovations

1. Mayank Goyal, MD, FRCPC;
2. Michael Tymianski, MD, PhD, FRCSC

+ Author Affiliations

1. From the Department of Radiology and Clinical Neurosciences, University of Calgary, Calgary, Alberta, Canada (M.G.); and Division of Neurosurgery, Department of Surgery, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada (M.T.).

1. Correspondence to Mayank Goyal, MD, FRCPC, Department of Radiology, Seaman Family MR Research Centre, Foothills Hospital, 1403, 29th St NW, Calgary, Alberta, Canada. E-mail mgoyal@ucalgary.ca

Key Words:

• stroke care
• stroke delivery
• stroke management

We are pleased to introduce a new section in Stroke. As implied by the name, it is meant to be a forum for submissions dealing mainly with solutions for issues in stroke care and research that impact progress. Submissions may address the full range of problems arising in stroke research and care and should focus on the solutions that are proposed by the authors.

This section entails a departure from the traditional, hypothesis-driven, scientific communication. Why then might we need such a section? The traditional scientific article comprises a hypothesis, an experimental design to test the hypothesis, and results that comprise a clinical or laboratory data set. Analysis of the results then allows a discussion and conclusions to be made, thus leading to further hypotheses or changes to clinical practice that enable scientific progress. The resulting scientific article has a traditional format and undergoes a peer-review process to evaluate its scientific merit, importance, credibility, and the appropriateness of its conclusions.

However, progress has several components; an initial one is the innovation that leads to initial hypotheses or to changes in practice that must subsequently be tested. The Webster English Dictionary defines innovation as “the act or process of introducing new ideas, devices, or methods.” Clinicians and researchers do this all the time. Innovation takes place any time when we try to improve on what we already do, frequently in response to a problem encountered in day-to-day work. As the definition suggests, innovation can happen at multiple levels. A team
Full article here;
http://stroke.ahajournals.org/content/45/1/6.full